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For six years The Healthy Compulsive Project has been offering information, insight and inspiration for OCPD, obsessive-compulsive personality, perfectionism, micro-managers and Type A personality. Anyone who’s ever been known to overwork, overplan, overcontrol or overanalyze is welcome here, where the obsessive-compulsive personality is explored and harnessed to deliver what it was originally meant to deliver. Join psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author Gary Trosclair as he delves into the pitfalls and potential of the driven personality with an informative, positive, and often playful approach to this sometimes-vexing character style.
Gary Trosclair: So you want to
change, maybe a habit, a relationship
pattern, or the way you work, but
something keeps pulling you back.
Sound familiar?
The desire for personal growth
can sometimes collide with our
personality traits, much like a bird
hitting a window it couldn't see.
The parts of our personality that
limit us, may not be visible at
first, and they cause us suffering.
I am Gary Trosclair psychotherapist,
Jungian psychoanalyst, and
author of the Healthy Compulsive
Project, book, blog and podcast.
And in this episode, I'll break
down the six specific reasons why
change is so hard for perfectionist,
obsessives, and type A personalities.
And starting today, I'm also experimenting
with video because if I'm going to ask
you to get out of your comfort zone, I
should be doing the same thing myself.
It's also a chance for me to
practice tolerating imperfection.
So join me for episode 113 of the
Healthy Compulsive Project Podcast.
Six Reasons Perfectionists
Struggle with Change.
So you want to change, but you're finding
it harder than climbing Mount Everest.
Your discouragement is understandable.
There are plenty of reasons for
the difficulty in making change.
I've been a psychotherapist for about
35 years now, and I've seen a lot
of things that slow people down from
becoming healthier perfectionists.
But if we're aware of the blocks,
they're less likely to get in our way.
To try to make them more recognizable i've
narrowed them down to six main issues.
I will explain these in a moment,
but first, just so that we're on
the same page, here are six of the
things that I imagine my readers
and listeners might want to change,
have less need for control,
order completion and resolution.
Be less perfectionistic, angry, and
critical about themselves and others.
Not be so rigid about things
needing to be a certain way.
Not think about what others
think of them so much.
Be less obsessive, worry
less and procrastinate less,
be less hurried and urgent.
Assuming these types of changes
appeal to you, let's dig into
what makes them hard to achieve.
So the first of the six is that
you may adopt avoidance goals
rather than approach goals.
I set you up for failure with that
list . Notice how the goals I
tried to get you to agree to are all
about being less rather than more.
These goals are motivated by
avoidance rather than approach.
While avoidance, motivation can
sometimes be helpful, it usually
doesn't get you where you want to go.
If you want to stop or limit some sort
of behavior, you'll need to replace
it with something more meaningful.
Let's try those goals again.
One, have more capacity to let go.
Be more accepting and appreciative of
life as it is, especially when throngs
of unresolved issues shout at you.
Have more affection and compassion
for your less perfectionistic
self and for others who don't
get the glories of perfectionism.
Be more flexible,
open-minded, and receptive.
Follow your North Star, even if
others think it's the wrong direction.
Be more proactive and take more
steps to live out your values.
Be more patient and present,
savoring the moment.
When our kids were very young and
we started taking them hiking, it
was much easier to get them up to
the top of the mountain where there
were fields of fresh blueberries just
waiting to be picked and savored.
Ask any coach.
You can't win with just defense.
You need offense too.
You can't score if you don't shoot.
The second issue is that your
impatience may be holding you back.
Change takes time to occur, time
to become visible and perhaps more
patience than you have yet to summon.
Your thirst for change, paradoxically
makes it more difficult because you
get impatient, and as we all know,
but fail to accept, haste makes waste.
The impatience buys into
all or nothing thinking.
For instance, you start meditating,
but give it up after two months
when you don't reach Nirvana.
You start therapy, but quit after
three months because you still
have uncomfortable feelings.
You start going to the gym, but give
up because you don't look as good
as all those people on Instagram.
I know the feeling.
"This is too slow!
I have to do something
drastically different.
Now.!"
We both have to get over it.
Neither the world nor our personal
complexes will move at our urgent pace.
Our speedy demon egos will need
to accept life at life's tempo.
Being impatient is not only unpleasant,
it's also unproductive and undermining.
As people with compulsive and
perfectionistic traits we're
set up to fail in this regard.
We despise inefficiency, and we're
quick to jump to the conclusion
that a given approach to change
is insufficient and inefficient.
To get down to the good stuff, rather
than only digging superficially and
changing strategies when things get
tough we need to dig one hole deep
by staying with reliable strategies.
In preparation for this episode,
I interviewed the tortoise.
That's right, the tortoise
who outraced the hare.
I asked him how he had done it.
He told me that he studied the compound
effect, the message of which is, in
order to succeed at anything, we need
to recognize the importance of small,
consistent, prudent behavioral choices.
Real progress builds on itself.
Life hacks and quick fixes can't do that.
We reach our goal with every little step.
Progress builds slowly at
first, but more quickly, even
exponentially as time goes on.
For the tortoise, that meant one small
step at a time because all those steps
with few deviations add up over time,
and all that consistency paid off when he
reached the finish line before the hare.
He told me the classic example
of the compound effect.
If given a choice between getting
one magic penny that doubles in value
every day for 31 days or getting
$3 million, what would you choose?
Well, what fool would take a magic penny?
But if we did choose the magic penny
after 31 days, we would have $10
million due to the compound effect.
Meanwhile, the inpatient fool who took
the $3 million has already spent it all
on cars , Rolex watches, and DoorDash.
The tortoise's magic Penny was
simply taking step after step.
We want it now, but we get less
of it when we're impatient.
Before you give up and trash your latest
self-improvement project, remember
that the genome wasn't built in a day.
We need to stick with our program.
I've had lots of experience
with this as a musician.
We have to practice daily
to make progress, and that
includes a lot of repetition.
After a while, it pays off
and it's really a blast.
Similarly, to chain, psychologically,
we need to practice daily in
order to lay down new neural
patterns to override the old ones.
I'll make some suggestions about how
to do this at the end of the episode.
We also need to tolerate setbacks.
If you expect your efforts and results
to be consistent and you chastises
yourself when they're not, you're buying
into the worst of your perfectionism
and selling short your progress.
Don't go all or nothing and don't
make this another control project.
And get your ego out of it.
This is not an inquisition
into your goodness.
Progress is not always predictable,
perceptible, or perfectable, and
it's certainly not always linear.
You may feel that you're revisiting the
same issues and over and over again.
Chances are though, that you're
revisiting them at higher levels as
if you are just ascending a spiral,
rather than just going in circles.
Enlist your perfectionistic, obsessive
compulsive determination in the service
of patience and persistence . The
tortoise was obsessively and compulsively
persistent, and he won the race.
The third issue is that you may
magnify difficulties and consequences.
You may see change as more
monumental than it really is.
It's the old mountain out of a mole
hill thing with the caveat that it
really is a hill, not just a mole hill.
Still it's not a mountain, and
you magnify how steep it is.
compulsives Often imagine that tasks
are more difficult and the consequences
are more dire than they really are.
I covered this extensively in podcast
episode 82, in case you want to
go back and take a look at that.
We imagine too far into the future
and we imagine it negatively
and inaccurately, especially the
thinking, planning types among us.
They try to foresee everything
they have to do in order to prevent
disasters before they happen.
Nice idea, but it doesn't work.
It's just another flavor of over control.
How does this mountain climbing
perspective prevent change?
You resist starting to climb the
hill because it looks too steep.
You exert more energy
and don't pace yourself.
That's not efficient.
You're more likely to give into
despair or burnout from overworking
before you reach the top.
Remember the story of Chicken Little?
The little known original version of
the story illustrates what happens
when we exaggerate the difficulty
and consequences of change.
So Chicken Little is in a bind
because she has both a high school
PTA meeting and a middle school band
booster meeting on the same night.
Missing either one, predicts
certain disaster to her.
She tells her therapist
about her predicament.
Her therapist suggests she'll
feel much better if she doesn't
take so much responsibility.
To her, not taking so much responsibility
would be climbing Mount Everest . And
because her defensive strategy of over
responsibility is threatened, when Chicken
Little thinks about not attending both
the PTA and band booster meeting this
week, she believes the sky will fall.
I'm not mixing metaphors here.
This is what happened when
she imagined a tall mountain.
Anyway, convinced of the impending doom.
She warns all of her feathery friends
and they hustle off to tell the king,
but they don't know where he is.
Overhearing all of this.
Foxy Lockie agrees to take them to the
king to tell 'em about the problem.
Instead, he leads them to his
den and he has oodles of chicken
dinners for the next week.
Chicken Tikka Masala, chicken Schwarma,
and C'oq au van . If you fall for the
illusion that the problem is monumental
and the sky is falling, you're cooked.
It's not a mountain, and
the sky is not falling.
One reason that we magnify the difficulty
of change is that we buy into the lie
of fixed mindset, thinking that human
capacity or avian capacity for learning
and growth are set entirely by genes.
We say, if I can't make this change
right away, that means I'm just not
good at it and I'll never get it.
Instead, we need to work
from Growth mindset.
The belief that with commitment,
our capacities and talents
can improve over time.
Notice that it never occurred to
Chicken Little, that she could
learn to tolerate the discomfort
of taking less responsibility.
Some of this comes from comparing.
You will want to give up if you think
others are able to change more easily than
you because they're more gifted all the
way back to diaper days, and now their
Instagram posts are beyond enviable.
" How come Sam can just turn
his brain off so easily?
He just floats through life while I'm
stuck in the swamp of obsessions, I'll
never be able to make that change."
Don't fall for it.
The fourth issue is that you might
set unrealistic goals for change.
In contrast to those who see things
as insurmountable some make change
difficult by aiming for Everest.
For instance, if you think you're
going to be as calm as Mr rogers
from the television show, A beautiful
day in the neighborhood after three
sessions of psychotherapy, you should
go to therapy to get that idea fixed.
This is actually a
common unrealistic goal.
Therapists often need to help
patients relinquish the goal of
not having bad feelings anymore.
If that's your expectation, you will
be disappointed and worse, you won't
know how to handle the disappointment.
If you accept that the goal is to be
able to exist alongside uncomfortable
feelings without identifying with
them . I mean things like, I am
depressed, I am apoplectic, I am
disappointed, you'll be moving in the
right direction and see more change.
Of course, this is just one
example of an unrealistic goal.
There are many, and we've been
warned by the great writers and
thinkers of the world, their
characters sometimes set unrealistic
goals and illustrate what happens.
There's Don Quixote who tilted
his lance at windmills with the
goal of being a chivalrous knight.
Nary a dragon did he slay and
Nary a damsel did he rescue.
Then there's Icarus.
His father warned him not to fly
too high and not to fly too low,
but of course he flew too high.
Anyway, he fell into the sea.
And of course there's Captain Ahab who
chased the great white whale Moby Dick
until almost everyone in his ship drowned
when the Aquatic Beast turned the ship
over like it was a child's paper boat.
Ahab could have saved all of us the
trouble of reading the 800 pages and
saved lots of trees from being cut down
to make those pages, if he had accepted
that he did not have to prove himself
by conquering Moby Dick, his Everest.
We make problems when we
make unrealistic goals.
Let the bloody whale be.
Okay, Gary enough with
the literature review.
How does this manifest in real life?
Here are just some examples
of unrealistic goals:
expecting to never feel annoyed by your
partner, children, or mother-in-law,
expecting to never react negatively
to the misalignments, misanthropes,
and misdeeds all around you.
Expecting Never to want
to have things resolved.
Expecting to finish the
screenplay in three weeks.
Expecting never to
worry about money again.
It's okay to moderate your goals.
People often change their goals
once they get into therapy and
start to develop more awareness.
Or once they start up the hill
by themselves and that's fine.
The fifth possible issue is that
you're probably too much in your head.
Change is not just the
result of better thinking.
It also takes emotional engagement,
imagination, and behaving the opposite
of the way you usually behave.
If you're trying to change only by
figuring things out, you're disconnecting
from your body and your feelings, and
you wonder why they won't listen to you.
They can't hear you when
you're that far away.
Yes, insight is important, but if
you don't slow down enough to talk
about that insight with your gut
and feel the feelings that you've
been avoiding so much of your life,
change will be slow in coming.
The core cause of obsessing is the effort
to think your way out of a feeling.
You might have noticed it doesn't work.
Many compulsives forego feeling for
control, but emotion is the lubricant
of the brain, and without it, the
damn thing rusts up and freezes up.
Being frozen is a great metaphor for
the unhealthy compulsive personality.
There's nothing wrong with the water
itself, it just becomes too rigid.
Think of Elsa from the
animated Disney film Frozen.
When Young Elsa uses her inborn
capacity to create ice and snow to
amuse herself and her sister Ana, but
over time, she loses control of her
capacity and freezes out everyone.
She suppresses her feelings,
fearing that they are too
intense and will lead to shame.
In effect, she freezes herself.
For Elsa to change and adapt to
her world, to connect, she had to
learn how to let it go, to allow
herself to be herself and to feel.
For those of you who don't dig
Disney, you might find Spock from
the television series, star Trek.
More relatable, half
Vulcan and half human.
Spock was often baffled by human
emotion and the behavior it led to.
In order to function with humans and
to find his own fulfillment, he had
to learn the language of emotion.
Otherwise, half of him was left out.
He couldn't merely figure
it out intellectually.
He had to experience feeling to change.
So if you are perfectionistic, obsessive,
or compulsive and you want to change, the
challenge may be to allow yourself to have
feelings such as insecurity, uncertainty,
and fatigue from trying to be so perfect.
These are the actions
that allow us to change.
You can't put your feelings in cold
storage and expect to be flexible.
Being too much in your head may
also mean that you isolate when
you really need more support and
structure it in order to change.
Social contact can get us out of our
head and lead to emotional experience.
For some people, friends and
family are enough support.
For others, therapy is the ticket, but
some people need the structure of a group.
Many medical students study together
and that's what gets them through.
Many people are better able to maintain
weight loss with the support of a group.
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of
support groups for people with OCPD or
perfection, but you don't have to have
a perfect match to get the benefits.
The factors in groups that seem to help
are regular attendance, accountability,
repetition over time, and social
norms that support persistence.
People with OCP are reluctant
to delegate, and this may seem
like a form of delegation, but
it's also a path to change.
The sixth and final possible issue
about change for you is that may
cling to the fringe benefits
of being obsessive compulsive.
It will make it harder to change if you
still get something out of your old ways.
We call these secondary gains.
For instance, if you're sick,
the secondary gain is that you
don't have to do the dishes or
the laundry or even act Very nice.
Cool.
But it also makes it harder
to start feeling better.
Which is not to say I think you're
malingering, but that outside of your
awareness, there may be resistance to
change because you'd lose something
sweet if you gave up the status quo.
Other secondary gains could be an
identity as a virtuous person, a
competent person, or perfect person.
Change might require modesty and giving
up the king of the mountain position.
And then there are the fringe
benefits of identifying as a
victim, someone else has been bad
to you and therefore you are good.
It's simple logic and flawed logic.
Frank has decide what
to do with this evening.
He can choose to stay up all night to
correct someone else's errors on their
team project, proving that he is the
victim of someone else's sloppiness.
Then he could display his victimhood
in the meeting tomorrow morning.
Or he could not take too
much responsibility and watch
a few episodes of friends.
For him, the first option is sexier.
Few of us are not tempted by
the siren call of the victim.
If you're upright and virtuous,
you may choose to clean up all the
slack of the muggles around you.
Remember, muggles are the normals in the
Harry Potter world who don't get the magic
of perfection, production, and control.
Anyway.
If you do choose to do this to clean
up the sloppiness of all the muggles,
you may feel the warm bath of being
the casualty of their laziness.
Another area of fringe benefits is
the comfort zone of risk aversion.
You're not willing to take the
chance of getting anything wrong,
being shamed, or shaming yourself
for not obsessing and compulsing
so much that you get it perfect.
The risk you fear is getting a
whooping from your inner critic
for letting go of control.
That makes change very difficult.
Now let's talk about some
takeaways about how to change.
Because repetition is a technique that
helps us to change, let's summarize
and reinforce what we've discussed.
Don't just sit there and
avoid what you don't want.
Go after what you do want
and what has meaning for you.
Don't give up and jump from
one change strategy to another.
To find the treasure, dig one hole deeply.
Don't assume it's impossibly difficult.
Be open-minded and consider that this hill
is probably not as steep as you thought.
Don't choose unrealistic goals.
Taking small steps consistently
will get you very far
. Get out of your head,
get into your feelings.
Don't avoid negative feelings.
Allow hopeful feelings to
motivate you and get help.
And finally, don't cling
to secondary gains.
Acknowledge what you get out of old
ways and ask whether that makes it
worth staying stuck in the status quo.
Now, I'm going to name 11 ways to apply
these ideas in very practical ways.
I'd suggest that you choose three
of them that address your specific
goals to focus on each day.
One, spend five minutes less
each day, cleaning or organizing,
do something fun instead.
Two, work 20 minutes less each day.
Three rest, 10 minutes each day.
Four.
Find three opportunities each day
to let go and be more flexible.
Five.
Tolerate one unknown each
day by not planning it out.
Six.
Accept one imperfection
in your work each day.
Seven.
Spend $1 you don't need to each day.
Eight, let someone get away
with one imperfection each
day without correcting them.
Nine.
Find three opportunities to
compliment someone each day.
10.
Make one decision each day not
to try to please someone else
with your perfect behavior.
And finally, 11, take 20 seconds
to review your list of five
most important values each day.
Each of these may make you feel
like you're about to lose something.
That's a signal that change
is coming and that's worth it.